I havn't spent much time looking at it yet, but the one thing that I reallylike is the new level-dependant Ranger tracking abilities table. Thelevel-independant shot in the P.H. has always struck me as silly.

>What is the feeling out there in Netland on "Unearthed Arcana"?>Is it worth the bucks? What's good and bad in it?

I think it is worth it. As an aside, these are 'official' changes, and thusif you plan on playing tournament or 'real' AD&D you must have it. I wouldhave preferred to have seen them run new editions of both Players and DMGsince I would like to keep that information separated, but that is a nitpick. Also, it should be kept in mind that Dragon magazine will require allmanuscripts received after (I believe) the end of August to allow for thematerial of the Arcana, so around the first of the calendar year Dragonwill be using that material as well. As far as content goes, I think ithelps significantly, although there are still some glitches in thesystem...

Interesting idea, to mine old Usenet posts like this. I never liked UA back in the day ("Comeliness"!?) but since then my views have softened towards it a bit. You want to be a drow elf? Wha, what was that again??

The polearms appendix is fun albeit a bit silly, cantrips are fun albeit a bit silly, and the fact that there's no index (at least in my copy) is just, well, sort of ridiculous (I know, the PHB doesn't have one either but that's 6 or 7 years between the two publications). We never used the Cavalier or Thief-Acrobat when the Dragons came out, and saw no reason to with UA either. God, in retrospect maybe I was a hardassed 3 book fundamentalist even back then.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.